Malumanday…
[Video][Website]
[4.67]
Thomas Inskeep: Maluma reminds us that the first part of reggaeton is reggae, with much more Jamaican influence than I tend to expect from most reggaeton records. A bit too laconic for its own good, though.
[5]
Megan Harrington: The music video reinforces it, “Borró Cassette” has a whispery slickness that codes “dirtbag boyfriend” to my ears. Maluma is seductive but without trying, coasting on the folly of youth and trap drums. The surprise twist ending — he really is out buying coffee — is a heartwarming touch; maybe he’ll give his heart to the next girl.
[7]
Iain Mew: It flows very easily, with Maluma’s performance a careful balance of confident and restrained. So easily that it made almost no impression on me at all until I looked at a translation, and then I kind of wished that I hadn’t. The best to be said is that he at least implies that he was roughly as drunk as the girl he made out with, but for all his careful persuasion, if she’s lying about being out of it she’s surely doing so for a reason.
[4]
Will Adams: The harmonized neighbor tones in the chorus — “cerveza-ahh-ahh,” for example — are as delicious as a cerveza itself. The lyrics — detailing not just drunk sex but blackout sex — not so much.
[2]
Alfred Soto: Typical you’re-drunk-let’s-fuck slobber over reggae preset. Maluma isn’t smarmy because he sings; he’s smarmy because the parts he chooses to sing emphasize her confusion and stupidity.
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: The influence of Drake south of the 23rd parallel has been at least as important as it has to the north. Not that reggaetón, dembow, or danzal singers needed his example to be sensitive loverboys, but 40’s production sense that less is more, judiciously applied, is all over the Caribbean this year.
[7]